Blast kills five in Pakistan

DPA Islamabad, June 7 (DPA) A remote-controlled bomb targeting law enforcers killed five people, including three policemen, in Pakistan’s North-Western Frontier Province (NWFP), police said Saturday. The incident occurred in the town of Dera Ismail Khan just before Friday midnight when a police team and locals reached a vacant piece of land where a less severe blast had taken place without causing casualties.

“Explosives planted on a bicycle parked close to the blast site went off when investigators were collecting evidence,” a senior police official Ghaffar Qaisarani said.

The explosion killed three policemen and two civilians, and wounded at least 10 people.

Qaisarani said the initial blast was a decoy and the real target of the perpetrators was the police.

Though no group claimed the responsibility for the attack, suspected militants with links to pro-Taliban fighters entrenched in neighbouring tribal areas are believed to be behind the attack.

Dera Ismail Khan, located some 300 kilometres west of Peshawar, has that witnessed a surge in violence after the military launched a full-scale operation in the tribal region along the border with Afghanistan to flush out al-Qaeda and Taliban elements.

However, the country’s new government that came to power after routing the political backers of President Pervez Musharraf in a Feb18 vote, have not used military means and initiated peace talks to quell the militancy.

The controversial dialogue prompted criticism from western allies who believed that the move would encourage the militants to regroup and strike international forces fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan. DPA